Based on the traffic that my previous articles about Sony Xperia Android smartphones had gotten through the years, I can say with confidence that many of my readers are big fans of this handset brand.

If you're one of them, here's something that I'm sure will put a smile on your face:

Sony Xperia XZs - the flagship smartphone of the legendary Japanese tech company for the first half of 2017 - has just been officially released here in the Philippines.

This top-of-the-line smartphone hit store shelves across the country last Friday - May 5, 2017 - donning an official suggested retail price of Php 39,990.

Sony Xperia XZs shares largely the same design language and construction as its direct predecessor, the Sony Xperia XZ, which is not bad at all given that the 2016 flagship was and remains to be a headturner.

You get the same tubular real metal shell that seamlessly encases the curved scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass face on top the brilliant 5.2-inch Full HD Triluminos display panel.

On top of that, the handset's svelte body remains to be IP68 Certified Water and Dust Resistant, which means that it is more than capable of surviving accidental splashes or drops in shallow water.

What makes Sony Xperia XZs truly special is its main 19 MegaPixel f/2.0 camera, which features the world's first ever memory stacked imaging sensor in a smartphone, which provides 5-Times faster image scanning and data transfer.

If you love shooting videos of fast moving subjects like animals in the wild or players in a ball game or practically any sport, you will definitely find this imaging feature very useful.

Under the hood, Xperia XZs runs its Sony-flavored Android 7.1 Nougat operating system with a powerhouse 64-Bit Quad Core Kryo and Adreno 530 GPU based Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, has 4GB of RAM, and comes with 32GB of internal storage that you can easily beef up using the hybrid secondary nanoSIM slot that also works as microSD card memory expansion slot.

It's been a while since I reviewed a Sony Xperia flagship so I'm certainly hoping to play with this new model soon and to give it a good test run. Frankly, Xperia XZs' innards aren't particularly 2017 standard for top-of-the-line handsets. However, let's keep in mind that a smartphone's actual performance in real world use is determined by several other factors apart from internal hardware.